May You Feel Every Tick with Avani Vitalis — WildFed Podcast #093

May You Feel Every Tick. It's a salutation and a toast. It's a farewell, and adieu. It's an admonition in tick country to stay tuned into your senses, a reminder to feel. So, for those of you who spend any time in the outdoors, we say it to you now as well… May You Feel Every Tick. We've got a special edition of the podcast for you today, because our guest is none other than Avani Vitalis — Daniel's wife, teammate, and very best friend. Daniel and Avani get asked a lot how they deal with the constant threat of ticks. They live in the Northeast of the US where the tick problem is epidemic. There's a few months of every year — prime foraging and hunting time — when the threat of Lyme disease, babesiosis, anaplasmosis, Powasson virus, relapsing fever, tularemia, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and even the alpha-gal allergy which causes severe allergic reactions to eating red meat, are all a very real and present danger. Should you avoid the outdoors? Should you be using permethrin or other bug sprays on your clothing or body? Should you be tucking your pants into your socks, or saturating yourself in essential oil formulas? Do you need a tick key or tweezers to remove an embedded tick? What do you do if you are bitten? What about your pets? Well, Avani and Daniel are going to cover all of that today. Not as experts reporting on the science but rather as two individuals living at ground zero, deep in the heart of tick country. This is their experience. It's not medical advice, rather it's just some insight into their personal approach. You may choose a different path, and we support that, but this is how they're doing it. Their method is a bit unorthodox by today's standards, but it works well for them as it has for many years now. We think the biggest take away is this; if you spend time in the outdoors where ticks are endemic, you need a strategy for living with them. Yours may be different, but you'll need one. The threat of tick borne illness is real, and the consequences are high. They've chosen to live their lives with awareness but not fear, and they're about to share with you, just how they do that. But, with all that said, this is Avani's first time on the show, so they thought they'd take some time first to talk about how they met and to give you a little background on their relationship. So if you're just here for the tick report, you can jump ahead to the creepy crawly part. But we hope you'll stick around for the whole conversation, since it's a lot of fun and pretty insightful too. View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/093